My Sister Rosalind Franklin

A Family Memoir

Jenifer Glynn

A personal view of Rosalind Franklin's life - of her personality, her family and background, and the authors own recollections

Explores not only Franklin's work on DNA, but also draws out her work on coals, carbon, and viruses

Includes quotes from many of Franklin's letters to her famly and is illustrated with a number of family photographs, and friends including Quentin Blake

My Sister Rosalind Franklin

A Family Memoir

Jenifer Glynn

Description

Rosalind Franklin is famous in the history of science for her contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA, the start of the greatest biological revolution of the twentieth century. Much has been written about the importance of her part, and about how her work was affected by her position as a woman scientist. Above all she was a distinguished scientist, not only in her work on DNA, but also in her earlier work on coals and carbons and in her later work on viruses.

In this family memoir her sister, the writer and historian Jenifer Glynn, paints a full picture of Rosalind's life. Looking at Rosalind's background; her early education, her time as a science student at Cambridge, and her relations with her family, to her life as an adult and her
time in Paris and at King's, Glynn shows how much her sister achieved and how she was influenced by the social and intellectual climate of the period she worked in.

My Sister Rosalind Franklin

A Family Memoir

Jenifer Glynn

Table of Contents

Prologue 1. Notting Hill2. Childhood and Early Schooling3. Early Education of a Scientist4. A Science Student in Wartime Cambridge5. A False Start6. Winning the War, with Coals and Carbons7. Happiness in Paris8. Misery in London9. Viruses, Models, and Success10. Afterlife12. AfterlifeEndnotes

My Sister Rosalind Franklin

A Family Memoir

Jenifer Glynn

Author Information

Jenifer Glynn read History at Cambridge and is the author of several books, including Prince of Publishers (1986), about the Victorian publisher George Smith, and The Pioneering Garretts: breaking the barriers for women (2008).

My Sister Rosalind Franklin

A Family Memoir

Jenifer Glynn

From Our Blog

By Jenifer Glynn
If Rosalind Franklin had lived, she would have been 92 today. But she died at 37, five years after the discovery of the structure of DNA had been announced by Watson and Crick. As Crick confessed later (but never confessed to her), "the data which really helped us to obtain the structure was mainly obtained by Rosalind Franklin".